Stormwater Design and Installation – An Insurance of Type
30 May 2026, Dubai – I started my working life many moons ago. My first full-time roles were in the Insurance Industry – firstly in an insurance company and later as an Insurance Broker. I maintain that these roles in which I was asked to visit companies from all sectors to learn how they managed their businesses, evaluate their risks and ultimate protect those businesses against the ‘what if?’ scenarios, provided me unique insights for my future working adventure.
Today, working with an excellent team at ReGen Global and its key partners including ERS, we work on water security and water management projects. Currently, a large part of this work is stormwater management – most commonly of urban and semi-urban developments.
There are two key elements on stormwater management;
(1) the protection of infrastructure, landscaping, and communities – and
(2) the treatment of stormwater as an asset or a resource; not a waste product.
Primarily it is in (1) above where I dust off my insurance hat. Stormwater management can be viewed as a type of insurance and a form of risk mitigation.
When understanding the correct level of protection required, data is assessed of previous years rainfall and storm severity. The issue remains that too much consideration is given to historical data. Insurance companies have actuaries that crunch numbers and assess risks. However, insurance works on the worst possible scenario; the value of a building, it’s contents, the contract price of a development or the annual gross profit of a business.
The insurance is there to protect against THAT ONE EVENT, and sometimes a risk assessor will stipulate requirements and make other recommendations to mitigate the risk.
This is where a well-designed, fit for purpose stormwater installation is like the insurance process. It protects and mitigates risk. If it is not sufficient – there will be financial loss. In 2024, Dubai government assigned a massive 2bn Dirhams to support businesses and residents that experienced uninsured loss.
One can argue that building a stormwater installation to cope with anything less than the storm events of April 2024, December 2025 or March 2026 is under-insuring and mismanagement. Why would you build a system to fail?
The argument that the storm does not happen every year, despite the history of the last 3 years, is irrelevant. The installation is there to protect the event when in occurs whether it be again this year, next year or in five years’ time. Like insurance, the cost of adequate protection is a fraction of the potential total loss when it occurs.
There is a good possibility in the future, when greater data is available to actuaries, that insurers charge higher premiums for certain risks like flood depending on the area, flood likelihood, number of previous claims as well as the level of flood mitigation installed by the developer including the age and maintenance of the installation.
The conclusions and recommendations are;
- Base stormwater installation capacity on the worst possible scenario
- Have the system purposefully designed
- Mitigate the Risk today – protect the development for the next 20+ years / protect the developers reputation
- Save money on repairs and remediation further down the road.
by Steven Vanson, CEO ReGen Global
